Challenging the Cognitive Status Quo
The Role of Pink Noise in Cognition
Strap yourself in for this weeks blog! The current learning cycle has been non-linear with moments of searching for anything that makes sense and moments of aha! This has all been accelerated via me learning with a group of other Ecological Psychology practitioners. The last 2 weeks has been about understanding fractals and brown, pink and white noise. All things, that on the surface have very little value as someone working in HR. But stay with me, these things are elements that as previously discussed indicate a complex dynamic system. The prior blog spoke about this in relation to change management and how traditional change management tools were not effective in creating change in complex businesses. Let’s now take these concepts and look at how they apply to individuals, specifically memory and learning.
Pink Noise
In the context of cognition, pink noise represents a system where cognitive events or processes are correlated across multiple time scales (aka fractals). This means that cognitive processes are neither completely independent and thus random (white noise) nor completely determined by their previous states (as in brown noise)(Blau & Wagman, 2022; Van Orden et al., 2003) .
The presence of pink noise in cognitive performances suggests that cognition is a self-organised, emergent process that arises from the interaction of multiple components across different time scales. In other words, individual cognition is also a complex dynamical system like group cognition and behaviour that we try to manage in Change Management.
This is consistent with the ecological view of cognition, which emphasises the role of the environment (embedded) and the body (embodied) in shaping cognitive processes.
Pink noise in cognition implies that cognitive processes are flexible and adaptable, able to adjust to changing environmental demands. It also suggests that there is a balance between stability and variability in cognitive processes, which allows for both the maintenance of coherent behaviour and the ability to adapt to new situations.
It can be argued the presence of pink noise in cognitive performances challenges the traditional view of cognition as a modular, computational process. Instead, it supports an ecological view of cognition as an embodied, embedded, and self-organised process.
This has implications for how we study and understand cognitive processes. Rather than focusing on isolated components or modules, we need to consider the dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and environment. We also need to develop methods that can capture the complex, multi-scale dynamics of cognitive processes, rather than simply averaging over trials or individuals (that one off exam).
Make it Practical….
My wife, is currently using all the cognitive psychology tools to remember facts for an exam she has coming up. This knowledge of facts is in very few ways representative of the work environment she has to perform within. This ability to write down procedural knowledge is what Gibson called ‘knowledge about’ the environment. Which is different to ‘knowledge of’ the environment which is gained only through interactions and direct involvement with the environment. Much of the society those reading this in, will appreciate we value ‘knowledge about’ far more then ‘knowledge of’. If one person has 2 years of leadership experience running an SME and another person has spent 2 years doing an MBA, which one does society value more? This is not to say knowledge about is not valuable, but the systems of which we assess the ability to cognise people by, are grounded in the theory that knowledge involves encoding and the storage of abstract symbolic representations in the brain. That someone’s ‘knowledge of’ the environment can be assessed by their ‘knowledge about’ the environment. These are two distinct things that Ecological Psychology explains so well (if not easily).
This is important for HR to understand, as Learning & Development is our wheelhouse. Understanding how people learn and most importantly develop skills that are most fitting with the environment. Darwin’s survival of the fittest was more focussed on the fit over the ‘est side. So this is not being about the cleverest (how high is your IQ), but how that skill most fits with the environment.
Lets take an example of how both Cognitive and Ecological Psychology look to explain a daily memory occurrence in my life- picking the kids.
Let's consider how the task of remembering to pick up the kids from school/club at 5 pm would be explained by both the traditional cognitive view and the ecological view.
Cognitive View:
In the traditional cognitive view, remembering to pick up the kids at 5 pm would be seen as a matter of encoding, storing, and retrieving a specific piece of information. The process might look something like this:
The information "pick up kids at 5 pm" is encoded as a symbolic representation and stored in long-term memory.
Throughout the day, the individual periodically checks their internal "clock" and compares the current time to the stored representation.
When the internal clock matches the stored representation (i.e., it's 5 pm), the stored information is retrieved and enters working memory.
The retrieved information then guides behaviour, prompting the individual to stop what they're doing and go pick up the kids.
In this view, forgetting to pick up the kids would be explained as a failure of either encoding (the information wasn't properly stored), retrieval (the information couldn't be accessed when needed), or monitoring (the individual didn't check their internal clock frequently enough).
Ecological View:
In the ecological view, remembering to pick up the kids at 5 pm would be seen as an emergent property of the individual's ongoing interaction with their environment. The process might look something like this:
The task of picking up the kids at 5 pm is not encoded as a discrete piece of information, but is embedded in the individual's larger system of goals, habits, and environmental cues.
Throughout the day, the individual is attuned to various information patterns in their environment that are relevant to this task - the position of the sun, the flow of traffic, the onset of hunger, etc.
As 5 pm approaches, these information patterns converge to specify the affordance of "time to pick up the kids". This affordance becomes increasingly salient in the individual's perceptual field.
The individual directly perceives this affordance and transitions smoothly into the action of picking up the kids, without the need for a separate "retrieval" step.
In this view, forgetting to pick up the kids would be explained not as a failure of internal memory processes, but as a breakdown in the individual's attunement to relevant environmental information. This could happen for various reasons - a disruption in the individual's usual routine, a change in environmental cues, or competing affordances that draw the individual's attention away from the task at hand.
The key difference is that in the ecological view, memory is not seen as a storehouse of static information (Gibson, 1966), but as a dynamic process of attunement to the environment. Remembering is not about retrieving internal representations, but about directly perceiving and acting on the affordances that are specified by the current situation.
This has implications for how we might design environments and routines to support memory tasks. Instead of focusing on strategies for encoding and retrieval, we might focus on creating stable environmental structures and cues that can guide behaviour in a more seamless way.
Of course, this is a simplified example, and real-world memory tasks often involve a complex interplay of internal and external factors. But the ecological view offers a compelling alternative to the traditional cognitive view, one that is grounded in the embodied and embedded nature of human cognising.
Blau, J. J. C., & Wagman, J. B. (2022). Thinking, Learning, and Remembering. In Introduction to Ecological Psychology (pp. 192–208). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003145691-14
Gibson, J. (1966). The problem of temporal order in stimulation and perception copy. The Journal of Psychology, 62, 141–149.
Van Orden, G. C., Holden, J. G., & Turvey, M. T. (2003). Self-organization of cognitive performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132(3), 331–350. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.132.3.331